Meetup and Libraries – 2017 Update

A few weeks ago, I received a comment on a 2013 post, in which I described exploring Meetup to promote a library program called Book Dating.

Deb Kauffman wrote, “Hi! I was wondering how successful using Meetup was for your event? I clicked the link above to see your Meetup page and it said it didn’t exist. 😦”

And I suddenly realized that although I’ve spoken at conferences several times about using Meetup for library programs, I’ve never gotten around to writing a blog post about how our use of Meetup has grown in the last 4 years…

After about a year on Meetup, we stopped running the Book Dating program. We realized that although we are book experts, we are definitely not dating experts, and that it was too hard to manage all the social aspects of the “dating” part of the program. (We did have one successful couple find each other a through the program – yay!)

But we really liked the way Meetup was working to bring new people into the library, so we have continued to use it to promote many of our programs into the community.

Since we have expanded beyond the basic 3 meetups account, we’ve even become Meetup Pro users – we pay every 6 months, and are charge $45 for each Meetup we run.